Casual Diehard

Happy Boxing Day! Hope you had a great Christmas weekend and got lots of great gifts that weren’t the various respiratory viruses of the day. And if you did get that, hope that some We Can Pod It Out can help you through!

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Happy Festivus! No grievances here, just thanks to Roger and Andrew for this fun show, which gives us a pulse even when the other stuff around here at Willets Pen gets a little sidetracked by life. Hope everyone has a great weekend, and we’ll be back strong on Boxing Day!

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There’s been a lot of baseball news, huh? Kind of overwhelming. Life’s been in the way of writing, but the subject matter isn’t going anywhere :)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit willetspen.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit willetspen.substack.com

Editor’s note: Hey, wouldn’t it be a good idea to post these with the Beatles songs? Well, starting today, we’ll do that. And I’ll go back to the past episodes and add them.

And… here’s Josie.

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Editor’s Note: Apologies for getting off the noon release schedule today, which was down to a mistake I made in setting up. I’m not dumb enough to promise it won’t happen again, but it won’t happen again the rest of this week, at least! Sorry. —Jesse

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This weekend will be exciting because we’ll get to donate our first bunch of winter hats from our Hot Stove, Warm Welcome drive, as State Senator Jessica Ramos hosts a holiday lunch for newly-arrived families here in Queens. The drive continues, as we’ll donate a hat for every hoodie we sell this month in our shop. Obviously, we wanted to get hats in time for this lunch, so we ordered some earlier in the month, and we’ll do another order at the end of the month, when there will still be winter to go!

By Jesse Spector

Some reads heading into the weekend…

It’s brutal to have lost both Mike Leach and Grant Wahl in the past week. Posthumous memorials at Channel 6 and from Grant’s wife Céline Gounder are each things to read while holding the sadness, while happier memories can be found in Spencer Hall’s 2011 boat outing with Leach, and Wahl’s introduction of an Ohio teenager named LeBron James to the world.

This isn’t a read, but an interesting and deep explanation of the impact of Leach’s Air Raid offense.

I always get a kick out of being reminded that the English soccer club Derby County used to play at The Baseball Ground.

As Twitter continues to burn down and the CEO dances about with open cans of gasoline, all are welcome on our Discord.

Free buses for NYC? At my day job, we’re deep into redesigning the bus network already. Go for it.

And back here in Queens, I have been to the Boca Juniors restaurant and I’m glad it survived the past two years and now gets to be the center of Argentina fandom in the city. And glad that they got the shine here from Hell Gate.

The Mets signed former Brewers catcher and 2021 All-Star Omar Narváez, which means that someone is leaving because that’s too many catchers. In his major league debut, back in 2016, one of the White Sox pitchers Narváez caught was Tommy Kahnle, who’s just returned to the Yankees. Kahnle appeared again in Narváez’s next game, and then his third game was a Carlos Rodón start… and now Rodón is coming to the Yankees, too. Game number four for Narváez? He caught new Mets starter José Quintana.

And then it continues. David Robertson, who made his major league debut at Shea Stadium… 

…got the save in Narváez’s fifth career game, a Rodón start. It took nearly a month, until his eighth game, for Narváez to not catch someone who will be with a New York team next year, unless Chris Sale or Jacob Turner somehow winds up here.

As Narváez and all those pitchers get ready to come to (or return to) the Big Apple, old friend Noah Syndergaard returned to Los Angeles, where he’s set to become the fifth player in history to appear for the Mets, Angels, Phillies, and Dodgers. He’ll join Dick Stuart, Dennis Cook, Dennis Springer, and Bobby Abreu in that oddball club, and be the first to take the New York-Anaheim-Philly-LA path to it.

I hadn’t realized that Stuart, the man best known for his awesome nickname, Dr. Strangeglove, even played for the Mets, let alone the Angels, Phillies, and Dodgers. I knew him as a Pirates slugger, part of the 1960 World Series team… and I may have known but forgotten that his best season was with the 1963 Red Sox, when he led the American League in total bases and runs batted in.

After a less impressive, but still really good (.811 OPS, 33 homers) season in 1964, the Red Sox traded Stuart to the Phillies for Dennis Bennett, himself a future Met in 1967 when the Sox sent him here for Al Yates.

And that’s when Stuart began the Syndergaard speedrun, playing a replacement-level season with the 1965 Phillies. They traded him to the Mets in February of 1966 for Wayne Graham, Bobby Klaus, and Jimmie Schaffer.

Stuart played 31 games as a Met, with one of his four homers coming off 1969 Met Don Cardwell… as well as one off his former Phillies teammate Chris Short. After the Mets released Stuart, he caught on with the Dodgers… and hit his first homer in L.A. off the very same Chris Short.

Short was a really good pitcher, but not at the level of the last guy that Stuart tagged for a dinger with the Dodgers, Steve Carlton. After two years with the Taiyo Whales in Japan, where he hit a combined 49 homers, Stuart came back to the States and hit one last tater for the Angels, off Tommy John.

In Stuart’s rookie season, 1958, he homered off Don Drysdale, Warren Spahn, and Robin Roberts. He took Sandy Koufax deep five times, tied with Cardwell, Johnny Podres, and Stan Williams for his most against any pitcher.

Taiyo Whales is a new team name for me… they’re now the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, having moved from Kawasaki to Yokohama in 1978 and briefly being the Yokohama Taiyo Whales before doing a Tennessee Oilers kind of thing. They had a pretty cool song, if not Beatles level. (Hope you’re enjoying We Can Pod It Out!)

The Tennssee Oilers… also had a song.

That one isn’t just not Beatles level, it’s not Shitty Beatles level.

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Editor’s note: No Pavilion with this episode, just the podcast! As we’re continuing to work on the best way to present everything here… we might as well ask, would you prefer fewer emails with more stuff in them, as we’ve been doing with mixed podcast/Pavilion posts… or would you prefer individual posts for each podcast and written thing, especially when they don’t really have anything to do with one another? Come on over to the Discord and let us know! And also hang out there and have some fun :)

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By Jesse Spector

Continuing the project that I referenced in yesterday’s Pavilion, I was looking to see who coached Centre College from 1938-41, and thus had young assistant DeWitt Weaver on staff. Instead, I found Centre president Dr. Milton Moreland’s carrot cake recipe.

This project also took me last night to 1959 in South Dakota, and another Sports Illustrated piece, this one by Roy Terrell, “Normalcy In A Small World.” Fellow fans of the Sickos Committee, which of course you are…

…will enjoy diving into this.

To the millions of football fans who focus their attention each Saturday afternoon on Syracuse and Southern Cal, on Northwestern and Texas and LSU, small-college football is a world apart. Yet there are far more small colleges in the U.S. than big colleges and hundreds of them play football every weekend in the fall. Some play very good football indeed.

In this number there are big, wealthy schools, which are smalltime only in an intercollegiate athletic sense: Cal Poly, with its enrollment of 5,000; Mississippi Southern, with 3,825; and dozens of schools, such as East Texas State and Mankato Teachers of Minnesota and Hofstra on Long Island, all around 3,000. Then there are the medium-size small colleges, schools with 800 or 1,000 or 1,200 students, like Lenoir Rhyne in North Carolina, Juniata and Bloomsburg in Pennsylvania, Hope and Hillsdale in Michigan, Adams State in Colorado, Whittier in California, Willamette in Oregon. They play good football, too.

And finally there are the small small colleges: Emporia of Kansas, Presbyterian of South Carolina, Sewanee of Tennessee—and Huron. Governed in most cases by the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) rather than by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), even their rules are different. They still have unlimited substitution, for example, to which the big schools are slowly returning. Freshmen are eligible for varsity competition. They have never adopted the two-point conversion nor have they widened their goal posts, partly because many of them can't afford to pull down and put up new goal posts every few years. But the game is the game; that isn't hopscotch Huron has been playing out there.

One thing, though: it’s definitely a piece that is of 1959. Huron College, which was a college before South Dakota was a state, called its teams the Scalpers. They later became the Si Tanka University Screaming Eagles before the school shut down in 2005. In 1959…

…like I said, the SI piece was of 1959. But that also means that the ending comes across in a sweet and charming way that it probably wouldn’t if it were written today, even if the feelings of joy that we get from sports at this level are so similar.

I think that’s something people look for a lot, and try to recapture, the sweetness of their youth, or the charm of the times before they were born, that they heard about from parents and grandparents. Nostalgia can be wielded in dangerous ways, as the very phrase that came to define a neofascist movement should make clear. It’s also worth remembering the positive appeal, that even in things we’ve come to be cynical about, there’s something good, and reasons that we fell in love, and often that generations before us did, too.

The nickname, the mascot cartoon, the “pretty coeds” caption… all stuff that wouldn’t make most readers have a second thought in that era. Three years later, Terrell was still at SI, and had a piece in the college football issue, which…

This is also of the time, right? But waving the Confederate flag is so much louder, something that never was about honoring heritage and tradition unless you’re talking about a heritage and tradition of racism — it’s a good thing that it’s become more common knowledge that Dixie fetishization and its incorporation into “traditions” was directly connected to Jim Crow and responding to the civil rights movement. Just because Huron College was a tiny school, without any of the clout of Ole Miss or the SEC, we can’t just give it a pass.

There are different levels of contempt available to us, and that’s important when we try to contextualize things. The Huron coed and the Ole Miss cheerleaders both have some old-timey racism going on, but there should be a discernible difference between a school drum and the flag of violent racist traitors.

Speaking of violent racists, that Roy Terrell story on Woody Hayes included a gem of an anecdote:

Two years ago, as a spectator at a game in Cleveland between the Indians and Yankees, Hayes suffered through the one-handed artistry of Vic Power at first base until he could stand it no more. "You're showing off," Hayes yelled from his box near the Indian dugout. "Why don't you use both hands and help your team win?" Power, whose ears are as good as his hands, dropped over and invited Mr. Hayes to discuss the matter further after the game; Hayes, probably figuring that much of the 230 pounds he carries these days is relatively useless in hand-to-hand combat, went home instead. He didn't go back to watch the Indians again until they traded Power to Minnesota. "That guy makes me sick," he says. "What's he got two hands for?"

Two paragraphs earlier, Hayes had slugged a reporter, which he denied but an assistant cheekily didn’t. But the big toughie suddenly zipped his lip and ran away from Cleveland Stadium until Power — not really a huge dude — wasn’t there anymore because he was scared.

In case there was any doubt of Hayes being exactly the kind of jackass in 1960 that he’d be for another two decades with unchecked power at Ohio State, that year Power won the third of his then-record seven Gold Gloves. He now trails only George Scott, Don Mattingly, and Keith Hernandez.

Hayes, meanwhile, has been surpassed as the Buckeyes’ biggest human paraquat of a head coach by Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer. Of course, Hayes had to walk so that they could run.

The man who can make Woody Hayes sickest of all is the archenemy, Jack Fullen, alumni secretary at Ohio State. Fullen once proposed that the school give up all pretense at amateurism, hire a professional team and control it under a bureau of football.

Fullen, who never wanted Hayes at OSU in the first place, did wind up managing to keep the Buckeyes out of the 1962 Rose Bowl... but obviously Hayes stayed right up until 1977, when he punched a cameraman during the Ohio State-Michigan game.

Haha, just kidding, Hayes kept his job a whole ‘nother year after that, until he punched Clemson’s Charlie Bauman during the Gator Bowl.

They should’ve listened to Jack Fullen. If only he’d had a carrot cake recipe.

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By Jesse Spector

I’m doing some research that doesn’t directly involve — at least not yet — Pro Football Hall of Famer Jimmy Conzelman, the last man to coach the Cardinals to an NFL championship, back when they were the Chicago Cardinals, in 1947. and player/coach (he missed the second half of the season as a player after hurting his knee in a win over the New York Yankees) for the 1928 champion Providence Steam Roller.

The Steam Roller was Conzelman’s last team as a player — he’d also been with the Detroit Panthers, Milwaukee Badgers, Rock Island Independents, and Decatur Staleys… after a college career in which he’d been part of the 1919 Rose Bowl champion Great Lakes Navy Bluejackets, 17-0 winners over the previously undefeated Mare Island Marines.

George Halas was the star of that Rose Bowl for Great Lakes, and brought Conzelman with him to Decatur to join the NFL’s first team. Conzelman ran for the only touchdown of the Staleys’ game against Rock Island that inaugural season, and also threw two touchdown passes to Halas himself in a November game against the Hammond Pros.

All of that is fantastically interesting on its own and a reminder of how much football has changed in a century, but it’s a diversion from the tangent that I was already on, which is finding out how Conzelman’s coaching career ended.

Conzelman went 8-22-3 with the Cardinals from 1940-42, and resigned to go to St. Louis — little knowing that the football team would eventually do the same — to work as the public relations director for the St. Louis Browns, the baseball team.

Here’s how the Chicago Tribune described Conzelman when he headed southwest in 1943:

Conzelman attended Washington university, St. Louis, where he later coached, and during World War I, he was a member of the famous Great Lakes eleven. Conzelman is one of the most versatile personalities in the field of sports. In addition to his football activities he has been a boxer, newspaper publisher, writer, salesman, composer, actor, and radio commentator. He is an accomplished orator.

Conzelman worked for the Browns for two years, and those two years included their only American League pennant before heading to Baltimore and becoming the Orioles. And then he went back to coach the Cardinals again, won the 1947 NFL title, got to the 1948 NFL championship game… and quit to work in advertising.

And also act alongside Gretchen Wyler in a St. Louis production of Damn Yankees, before Wyler had the role on Broadway (she succeeded Gwen Verdon).

That picture ran in Sports Illustrated’s 1961 football issue, itself a trove worth diving back into another day. Gerald Holland’s piece on Conzelman is as interesting as the subject himself, and then there’s this succinct preview of University of Idaho football:

The Vandals went 2-7, led to an improvement over the previous season’s 1-8 by tight end Reggie Carolan, a future all-star with the Chargers and AFL champion with San Diego and Kansas City (on the team that lost Super Bowl I). Reggie’s son, Brett Carolan, played at Washington State and won Super Bowl XXIX as a rookie on the 49ers.

The aggregate score of those seven Idaho losses (to Oregon, Oregon State, Washington State, Army, Utah State, Pacific, and Arizona) was 319-22. But they got a 27-18 home win over San Jose State, and finished the season in style with a 16-14 win over Montana to take the Little Brown Stein… which, this year, Idaho recaptured for the first time since 1999.

This kind of journey down a rabbit hole might seem like hardcore fandom, but I find it to be quite different, and in fact one of the paths that has brought me to easier accept being a casual fan (for the most part, but very much for football) — all of the teams out there have their own stories, with their own people, their own traditions, and their own fanbases. There’s always going to be a winner and a loser (or a tie, in our more refined sports), and the sports experience is richer if we take it all in. The casual experience is about not letting it get you so down when your favorite team loses.

Is it perfect? Definitely not. We still haven’t recorded a mainline Willets Pod episode since Addy and I took in the Emma Stone Game, and while part of that is about adults having a hard time scheduling things, part of it is definitely about us having needed some time to recover as fans. (We’ll be back soon, promise.)

I’m glad, though, to see what I feel is a healthier approach to sports, starting to come around… or at least to welcome Bomani Jones to the party.

For the record, I’m still not off the Knicks “narcotic,” as Bomani terms his former Falcons fandom. I can keep it under control most of the time, but I don’t think I’m ever shaking it, not when writing this very sentence sent me looking for Zion Williamson’s contract status once again (poison pill on any trades until July 1, 2023 when… sign and trade???) and, well, yeah.

I enjoy year-end music lists because it’s a great way to come across stuff that isn’t in my wheelhouse, but I might enjoy… and thanks to the Internet, I can find out really quickly (unlike when I bought a Pavement CD in 1997 based on a magazine review).

So, here’s our friend Michele Catalano’s year in music, which unlike Pavement and Rolling Stone, I will not hold against anyone for decades to come if any of it isn’t my bag…

…and here’s an opportunity to revisit Pavement.

Rolling Stone wrote…

Take “Stereo,” the first track on Corners and perhaps the most accessible song Pavement have made since their (modest) hit, 1994’s “Cut Your Hair.” “Stereo” is a dynamic, almost AOR statement, and it builds to the band’s loudest, cleanest crescendo ever.

To me, it sounds like a mashup of Talking Heads and Weezer that manages to capture nothing of what I like about either, so I guess some things don’t change in 25 years. Although we also have the Knicks for that.

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